In digital media, it’s not about the views: YouTube's Satya Raghavan

In conversation with head of entertainment partnerships at YouTube...Ravi Balakrishnan | ETBrandEquity | Updated: November 03, 2016, 10:12 IST

The head of entertainment partnerships at YouTube makes a case for engagement as YouTube expands to include an increasing number of content creators in a range of Indian languages. Excerpts from an interview.

As a former brand manager, why do you believe the job of the brand manager has got a lot tougher?

At the time I used to be a brand manager, there were a few companies where the brand manager was the owner of the P&L. People of the P&G ilk did that. But for a whole lot it was essentially handling the media mix. And I think that’s still the case. But when they see the digital medium – that’s actually not all that new anymore – a lot of them are still coming at it in from the classic graduation path. Sales to marketing or directly into marketing from B-schools. For a lot of them, unless they’ve actually practised digital, it is still something they need to pick up while they are trying to master the other mixes.

It’s reached an interesting tipping point. The digital numbers as part of the overall ad ex-have become significant. We at Google spend a lot of time working with brand managers, getting them to appreciate how this works. We do a lot of evangelising ourselves. What once took a lifetime to unravel, unravels in a couple of years now. You have a big platform coming up every two or three years. How do you make sure you are not just knowledgeable about that but also aware of how it impacts your business?

How do you go about connecting brands to the content creators on YouTube?

We ask brands to tell us what their users are passionate about. There was a time when Indians had three passions: cricket, cinema and curry. Today, Indians tend to be a lot more heterogeneous even within a geography. If a brand’s consumers are passionate about music, we say ‘ Look, here’s what the consumer of today is passionate about in the music space. Here are the guys doing the most interesting stuff or who have the largest fanbase. How can you build a programme around that?’ That’s exactly what we did with Jammin, with two sponsors who are actually very close to music in how they’ve positioned themselves: Signature and Airtel.

What are some of the myths you’ve had to debunk along this journey?

A lot of people see the videos but one of the things that we spend a lot of time on happens beyond just the video. The community being built and the interactions consumers have with the content. Unlike TV where it’s literally only what happens on screen, on YouTube and social media, there’s a lot of two-way communication.

The second factor is a lot of people look at something and say: how many views has this got? But in digital media it’s not about views but engagement. How much of the content seen was appreciated We tell brands to go a little deeper and look for engagement in the true sense of the word. It is a far more important metric than just views.

We evangelise, obviously. The second thing we do is matchmaking. The third is to work with our partners and creators to come up with interesting properties that a brand can be a part of. It’s a continuum. We work with agencies like GroupM for Jammin. It’s truly democratic. When we get a brand to have a say in how they’d like that content to emerge, we are empowering the brand as well.

We understand there’s been a significant rise in regional content creators?

It is part of what I call the three waves of content: till 2013-14 it was pretty much metro-centric, driven by Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. Some of the creators that emerged from that class were AIB, TVF... The next couple of years, we saw the same kind of thing happen in the South. It mirrored the fact that the metros are more affluent and the South is the next most affluent region. The third phase is truly Indic. Being spurred by all the access strategies, there are a lot more people from the north and the east and the west who, due to low data prices, can sample some of the content. That wave is happening as we speak: people creating in Bengali and Gujarati or Haryanvi humour emerging as an interesting subgenre within comedy.

How long before brands come on board?

All the good work we saw in the South last year is resulting in brands working with southern creators this year. We did a program with Mirinda and Kit-Kat called laughter games with both those products integrated into the shows. Brands will start working next year with the content creators we discover this year. We see early sparks of brands asking us questions like ‘can you put me in touch with a food creator in the East?’